Last month, Burundi and Tanzania [signed](https://www.railwaygazette.com/infrastructure/contract-signed-to-build-first-railway-to-burundi/68306.article) an agreement with two Chinese state-owned companies to construct a new railway to ports on the Tanzanian coast. This will be landlocked Burundi’s first railway, and its primary use will be exporting minerals, specifically nickel. At a cost of more than $2 billion, it is just the latest major infrastructure project financed by an outside power to be announced in Africa.
These days, coverage of major infrastructure projects like these are usually framed in terms of the emerging geopolitical competition for minerals, which is not necessarily inaccurate. The U.S. and China, for instance, are each currently financing railways linking copper mines in Central Africa with ports on opposite sides of the continent. But there is more to these developments than geopolitical competition: Large-scale infrastructure projects built and planned across the African continent, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment in recent years, are essentially replicating colonial models of infrastructure, in turn recreating economic and trade relations—and their associated inequities—from a bygone era.
Most colonial economies in Africa were extractive in a straightforward sense. Raw materials like copper, gold, rubber and timber were extracted and shipped to Europe to support the economies of colonizing powers. Infrastructure was therefore built to connect mines and plantations to ports, rather than to other locations on the continent. The basic goal was to get raw materials from the interior to the coast as quickly and cheaply as possible.
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